D-Link Covr review: fails to fix Wi-Fi woes

D-Link's NZ$600 Covr attempts to help home users fill Wi-Fi
blackspots. I say attempts because the results are
hit and miss. Most of the time it misses.

The kit first
arrived at Castle Bennett in May. I tried and failed to make
it work at the time. This week I tried it again and got it
to work. Yet, as we shall see, it disappointed.

In the
last few days I've been busy revisiting and retesting all
the routers and related kit that I have to hand.

Chorus
installed my fibre this week. I've a gigabit line. So for
the first time Wi-Fi is my speed bottle neck. There's a slew
of products which, on paper, promise Wi-Fi speeds greater
than 1 Gbps. None of them come close.

More about that in
another post. Let's get back to Covr.

During testing it
worked as expected for a fleeting moment. The system was
unable to create a stable network for more than 20 minutes
at a time. When it did manage to work, the performance was
erratic and poor.

Covr is an unwelcome reminder of the bad
old days of home networking.

If you were there you'll know
what I mean. In those days a new piece of software could
make a network grind to a halt. At times it felt like a
sneeze could put a home network out of action for
hours.

Mesh
network

D-Link's Covr is an example of something
known as a mesh network. This is a way of spreading
Wi-Fi signals over a larger area than a single wireless
router might cover. In effect you have three connected
wireless routers, but to the user they look and act like a
single router.

Mesh networks are common in offices,
campuses and large buildings.

You might want a mesh
network if you have a large home or the house is laid out in
a way that means the Wi-Fi isn't strong enough in places
where you want it. Say you've had fibre installed next to
your TV at one end of the house and a kid's bedroom at the
other end gets a poor Wi-Fi signal.

There are other
consumer mesh network products on the market. Most seem to
suffer from similar flaws. This suggests to me this is
because the technology isn't quite ready for everyday
users.

If Apple hadn't lost interest in home networking,
mesh technology would be ripe for that company's attention.
Apple has a knack for packaging unpolished technologies in a
consumer friendly ready-to-use format.

Not so
simple

In the Covr box are three wireless access
points. One is the main unit. D-link calls them
nodes.

Each node has a power supply. And that
means it needs a power socket. The power cables are about a
metre long, so you're restricted to putting nodes near power
outlets. There is a rival home network technology that uses
power outlets. You might want to consider that instead of
Covr.

The box also holds a single Ethernet cable and, for
the aesthetically minded, alternative colour fascia plates
for the access points. Presumably this is to make sure your
nodes don't clash with the curtains. I find this silly
because even if you change the cover the nodes still stand
out.

There's also a sheet of paper optimistically labelled
Simple Setup Guide. You can work through this, or
you can download an iOS or Android app that walks you
through the process.

As we shall see, the app didn't work
for me. Which meant I had to return to the paper
instructions.

Covr app

The app tells you to
connect the main node to a power supply and to turn off your
modem. You then connect the access point to the modem with
the Ethernet cable and switch everything on. Once everything
is running, you are then asked to log into the Covr wireless
router from your phone.

In my case this simply did not
happen. The iPhone could find the router, but it couldn't
log on. Nor could my small iPad Pro or my other iPad Pro. I
then tried to do this all over again with an Android phone.
Once more, there was nothing. Four attempts with four
devices didn't work. Not a sausage.

When I first tried
Covr I gave up in frustration at this point. This time
around I attempted to manually log-in to the router from a
desktop Mac. It worked. I managed to get into the web-based
control panel.

Part of the panel shows a map of the
network. If one of the connections, and this includes the
connection from the main node to the internet, is broken it
shows up in red. At this point things appeared to be running
fine. The next task is to configure the secondary
nodes.

Secondary nodes

In some ways
configuring secondary nodes is clever. As already mentioned,
you have to find an extra power socket to do this. Given the
master node needs to connect to a modem which needs to
connect to the fibre ONT and all three need a power supply,
you need four power points to configure Covr. I had to use a
distribution board. There are other cables here, so it is a
rats' nest.

Once you have power, you then connect the
secondary node to the main one using the Ethernet cable.
After a few minutes the light changes colour. When it turns
white, you're configured.

At this point you can unplug,
move the secondary node to a Wi-Fi blackspot and connect it
by wireless
back to the mothership. The light flashes orange then glows
white when you can connect. You may need to move it about
for a while until it turns white. Let's hope all your Wi-Fi
blackspots are in easy reach of a power socket.

A
working wireless mesh?

At this point I had a working
wireless mesh. Well almost. None of the mobile devices would
connect. But I did have strong signals around the house and
all the PCs in the house were able to connect.

After about
20 minutes of a working mesh network, the main Covr node
lost its internet connection. I should point out that
nothing had moved, there were no external events, no visible
triggers.

Next the secondary nodes dropped off the mesh
network. I spent an hour troubleshooting, but nothing I did
changed things.

Eventually I decided to reboot everything
and start once more from scratch. It took about an hour to
get back to the same point with a working mesh. About an
hour later it all fell apart again.

This was the pattern
all day. Actually I'm not sure about that. I gave up the
third time the network collapse. Life is too short. In the
end I packed the Covr bits and pieces back in the box. It's
not for me.

Performance issues

During the
brief interludes while things were humming, I tested the
internet connection speed from the iMac. It was getting
around 150 mbps up and down. This is less than half the
usual connection speed through the main UFB modem and
wireless router. Typically the iMac 'sees' 350 to 420 mbps.
So the price of filling in Wi-Fi blackspot is a much slower
connection.

It turns out poor performance is by design.
Mesh networks in offices and factories have a separate
channel to manage traffic between nodes. Covr uses the same
Wi-Fi bandwidth
that connects devices to the access points. In other words
it shares the connection with your devices. This explains
why we only saw half the usual connection speed.

I can't
recommend D-link's Covr. It seems half-finished. There was a
firmware update that I installed before testing, so the
software is up-to-date.

Of course, you might have a
different experience. The fact that none of the devices,
other than the computer, would connect is a deal-breaker.
For me the slow network speed is also a problem. I'd prefer
to spend the NZ$600 asking price on a better quality
wireless router and learn to live with any Wi-Fi
blackspots.

Contact Bill Bennett

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